Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding s

Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P) Sounds like begging the question and reacting to a point I wasn't making, so let me answer a question you're not asking by asking a question you may not answer: Are there any such communities today? Your question seems to imply that you believe such communities are possible. Technologically I have no doubt that that's true. Hey, many BBSs were created, run, staffed, maintained by volunteers back in the day. Large swathes of the original web were created by universities without profit. However, technology isn't the whole story. In order for things to shift where it's likely "to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people" (this point assumes a site with the breadth and universality of Facebook), the world would have to change to such an extent that those people couldn't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow. That world simply does not exist today. To beg the question again, do you think my mother (who counts as one of the same people whose content I'm interested in, and by extent my analogy includes anyone's mother) would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow to replace her use of Facebook today?